The reflections, a day later

“Why are we here? It is the most important question that a human being has to face. I believe life has meaning despite the senseless deaths I’ve seen. Death has no meaning, life does.”

Elie Wiesel

Every January 27th I am confronted with my humanity, but also with the impossibility of feeling and empathizing enough, or at least proportionally to the misfortune of the systematic murder of more than ten million human beings. Yes, the data is correct: between 1939 and 1945 a dehumanization apparatus was put into operation that resulted in the murder of six million Jews and four million more deaths, including gypsies, homosexuals, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and people with disabilities. all of them exterminated for racial, religious and ideological reasons.

As much as I resist and try to convince myself that this event corresponds to the past, and repeating to myself “that the world has changed”, the Commemoration of the International Day in Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust, puts me on pause and violates my mind with an annoying series of reflections and questions:

After a century full of death and pain: What did we not learn? Wasn’t the lesson of two great wars, bloody revolutions, invasions and the excesses of totalitarianism enough? And when thinking about Mexico: how do you live in a country where there are eleven women victims of femicide every day? Why the trafficking, abuse and exploitation of children? Is it fair to tolerate the forced disappearance of hundreds of thousands of people? Why such inhumane treatment of migrants?

The answers are conspicuous by their absence. At the end of the day, there is always someone else who answers them, a supposedly wise voice that clarifies what is happening and points out an unpunished and inaccessible perpetrator. In short, the person responsible for the rapes, the femicides and the disappearances, operates in the distance and does his thing on a distant horizon, where I can do nothing more than passively observe him and take care of myself. And so everything will be fine, until it’s my turn to be the victim.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is about to complete a year and since March 2017, the Rohingya people have been harassed and persecuted in the little-known genocide in Myanmar. This new genocide, based on discrimination and religious persecution through social networks, has materialized with the rape of women and girls, the burning of markets, the blocking of access to farmland and supply centers for starvation and torture and death of thousands of Rohingya children and adults at the hands of the Myanmar army.

One of the most striking aspects of this crime against humanity is that the hate speech that has led to the systematic murder of the Rohingya is exacerbated and spread through mobile devices.

Put in our daily life, this sounds serious and distant to us. But the truth is that, if we are honest and even-tempered when analyzing our day-to-day life on social networks, we will have to recognize that many times we are silent witnesses to an attack and we prefer not to respond and choose not to comment. It is more ethical for us to remain on the sidelines, neither against nor for.

The ethnic cleansing operation carried out by the army and the Buddhist police of Burma against the Rohingya Muslims in the state of Rakhine in Myanmar, makes it clear to us that the hatred that is spread on social networks has made these people “the ethnic minority and most persecuted religious on the planet. For this reason, before remaining indifferent to a disqualification or minimizing the scope of a campaign of verbal aggression -like the ones we hear every day-, let us ask ourselves: Am I promoting the emergence of a new genocide?

If previous experiences are of any use and what we see, read and perceive coincides with some discriminatory and violent practice, let’s organize and denounce it.

Perhaps we will be able to prevent one more stain in the history of humanity.